Daughters Unto Devils Read online

  “Hush,” she grumbles and makes her way over to the chest which contains her own nightshirt. “Obviously, the circumstances have changed.”

  “It’s hard to believe we will be settling elsewhere,” I say, eager for the chatter between us. “It will be strange to live somewhere so far away from the clouds and the trees.”

  But Emily just pulls her nightshirt over her head and climbs into bed next to Joanna without a word.

  * * *

  The rain has ceased by the next morning, and Pa rushes to pack things for the resettlement before the sun rises. Clearly we are wasting no time. Ma wakes us early so that we can help make breakfast before the day of especially hard work. She stirs cornmeal mush, while Emily goes out to pick blackberries and I twist hay into sticks for the fire.

  Joanna and Charles are still sleeping deeply, unaffected by the cooking sounds and smells and urgent whispers of today’s plans. Ma explains how Emily and I will need to help her and Pa prepare the wagon for the trip. Almost all of our furniture will need to stay behind, she tells us. Pa will be able to make more at the new homestead, with the proper supplies, and the free room in the wagon will be better spent on supplies and clothes and tools for cooking and building.

  “Should we also pack wood from the shed?” Emily suggests. “For fires?”

  “Yes, the wood,” Ma says while she mixes the mush in a large bowl. It steams around her hands as though laced with magic. “I’d forgotten. We will need to bring some of it along, as well.”

  Pa moves back and forth between the cabin and the stables, collecting his tools and rifles and bullet pouches into different piles on top of the tarp that lies outside the front door. He fills an empty sack with utensils and trinkets and other small items of the like, and already the cabin is beginning to look emptier.

  When I go to the stables to give Pa his breakfast, I notice that his purchase consisted of much more than usual, proof that he decided upon this move long before leaving the settlement yesterday. For somebody who insists the Lord would never let the events of last winter repeat themselves, he sure seems afraid of the possibility.

  Hidden beneath an oiled canvas to protect it from rain are stacks and stacks of dried meat strips, bulging bags of dried corn and wheat and spices, salt pork, turnips, molasses, dried fruit, jars of jelly. I marvel at the amount of food, run my hands over the jars and bags and wrappings.

  “We’ll need it all,” Pa says from behind me. I turn to hand him the bowl of blackberry-topped corn mush and a tin cup filled with coffee. “The trip will be very long. I traded some of my father’s gold to arrange for there to be an ox at the foot of the mountain to help share the load with the horses.”

  He speaks without looking upon my face.

  “I’ve never ridden in the wagon before,” I observe aloud as I look at the pile of assorted wooden parts for it. “None of us have.”

  “You’ll be walking behind the wagon for most of the trip,” Pa says in between big bites, his voice quiet and distant like it always is with me now. “There won’t be enough room left to ride comfortably for long periods of time.” When the bowl is empty, he hands it to me without meeting my eye and motions me away.

  When breakfast is through, the work begins. The large, hickory bows that will be erected for the canvas over the top of the wagon are piled together behind stacks of feed grass, and we pull out the large curves of wood and line them up in the front clearing.

  Ma joins Emily and me to help spread a strong-smelling oil over the huge white wagon canvas, a task that will protect the wagon’s contents from water damage in case we should travel through rain. It takes the entire day for us to assemble the hickory bows over the wagon and stretch the canvas over the top, then pack as much as we possibly can into the bed of the wagon.

  We will be abandoning our cabin in the morning.

  Before going to bed, Pa goes over the plan for tomorrow. Before dawn we will rise, eat a quick breakfast of dried meat and pan biscuits, and head to the bottom of the mountain as carefully and quickly as possible. Ma will ride in the front of the wagon with Pa, holding Hannah, and Joanna and Charles will sit in the back of the wagon until we reach the foot of the mountain.

  Emily and I will walk behind the wagon to watch for potential wheel breaks or other problems. Once we’ve reached the bottom, Pa says, we’ll be able to push forward to our new home at a much quicker pace. According to the men in the settlement, if we head down a certain line of forest for long enough, we’ll come across an array of abandoned cabins to claim one as our own. Pa expects that we’ll be able to find someplace within a fortnight.

  “There is a surprise waiting for us at the bottom,” he concludes, just to pique the interest of Joanna and Charles, who have spent the last half of the afternoon crying and saying goodbye to everything in sight—trees, rocks, the grave of their pet toad that got its bowels hollowed out by a coyote a few nights ago. Pa must be talking about the ox. “A very exciting surprise.”

  We fall asleep early, and in the morning after we’ve risen and dressed and eaten, we begin our journey to the bottom of the mountain. Emily and I walk behind the wagon as planned while Pa leads it down carefully, steering the horses in long, slow curves that keep it from tumbling out of control with speed.

  I turn back to look after my old home, my old life, only one time. Early morning mists swirl over the front clearing of the cabin as the sound of hungry birds peppers the air with cheeps. The air is damp and earthly sweet. I am bombarded by the memory of Emily and me playing with each other as children, whispering secrets and singing songs and telling ghost stories around the fire pit outside.

  Dearest friends forever, we’d promise each other. Forever and a day.

  Resettlement or not, those days are over. Emily will never think of me as her home again. I think of the part of me that died here last winter, the part that will dwell within the cabin, like a ghost, and wait for Emily to come back. But she never will, of course.

  The ghost will be forever waiting.

  “Goodbye,” I whisper to the memories, to Henry, to the cabin.

  “Goodbye,” I whisper to the lost part of myself.

  From afar, the abandoned prairie cabin appears to be very large. It is at least three times the size of our old one, a giant roofed rectangle of log stacks that sits randomly on the stretch of endless flat grasses. Jackrabbits the size of small coyotes hop around in scattered clusters over the landscape, their ears amusingly oversize.

  Pa whoops at the sight of them, and I wonder just how much rabbit stew a single one of those creatures would create. We haven’t eaten stew or anything heartier than dried fruits and nuts for over a week now. Traveling didn’t go quite as quickly as Pa planned due to the extra heavy load, two broken wheels, and the reality of how long it took to set up and break down camp for a family of seven twice each day. So he stopped hunting to cut back on wasted time.

  All of the animals survived, and we’ve managed to avoid illness, though, so I suppose that in itself is another true-to-blue Verner family miracle. For twenty days we traveled, we camped, we ate hastily prepared turnips and leathery meat strips and drank woody water from the rain barrel. Our clothes, even while dry, are completely rotted with sweat, and the fabric feels as though it is stiffened with wax against our ever-damp skin.

  From the foot of the mountain, the rolling grassy hills lined with bushes eventually leveled themselves out before transforming to an endless stretch of prairie lands, covered with tall grasses and sizzling in the sun.

  The first cabin we came upon was occupied by a family with three small children, who waved to us like ants on the horizon as we passed the area from a distance. The second one was empty, but smaller than our mountain cabin and riddled with holes and unfilled gaps between the logs. By the time we discover the third, everybody is cross and desperate for the journey to end.

&
nbsp; Please, let this be the one, I think as I wipe the sweat from my eyebrows. I don’t think I can take this much longer.

  I try to remember the point where the grasses went from short and thick to tall and willowy, but for the life of me I cannot. I am so tired, and my feet hurt so much from walking that I’ve had to ride in the back of the wagon with the children for the past few days, while Emily rode Blackjack to lead Rocky and the ox while they pulled.

  I am no more used to the idea of a baby inside of me than I was before we left the mountain.

  Pa, Ma and Hannah sat on the front bench for nearly the entire ride. The bumps and sudden jerks that the wagon took were uncomfortable for the rest of us, but seemed to relax the baby more than she’d ever been before, and I am glad that at least Hannah is feeling at ease with the conditions.

  The prairie seems to go on forever, into the startling blue sky embellished with fluffy white clouds, except for a dense stretch of forest that begins about a mile to the south. The sight of the trees is comforting, as it reminds me of home. If I ever find myself missing the mountain, I could just go to that forest and pretend, even for a little while, that I was back there again.

  From this distance there appears to be a fence wrapped around the front of the desolate cabin, and I know that Ma is probably very pleased about that. I think of our cozy cabin cradled high in the mountains, with the front clearing that was raked and lined with smooth white stones.

  “Wow,” Emily breathes from on top of Rocky, just outside the wagon where I’m sitting with the children. “It’s so large!”

  “See?” Pa turns around in the wagon to smile at us, relief softening his eyes for the first time since before we left the mountain. “I told you the Lord would provide!”

  “We don’t know yet if this is the one,” Ma says flatly. “We’re only seeing it from afar, and it could be in ruins.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Pa insists. “Nothing that a few repairs can’t take care of. Everybody, welcome to our new homestead!”

  Ma frowns. I can’t help but wonder that if at any point, between the disappointment of the second cabin and the children beginning to cry every night about their hatred for camping, perhaps Pa had considered that taking the word of a couple of farmers about how much opportunity this land held might not have been the cleverest idea.

  Joanna and Charles begin to cheer at the mention of the word homestead. Blackjack and Peter, the ox, gain a sudden burst of energy, as if they know that their bones will finally be able to properly rest if they just finish it now, and the wagon begins to glide effortlessly through the prairie. As we gain speed we begin to bump, softly at first but increasingly violently as the wheels tear over animal holes and thick bunches of field grass. I fold my arms over my middle in an effort to keep things as still as possible.

  “Slow down,” Ma nearly yells and throws her hand over the upset sunbonnet on her head. “It’s not going anywhere.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Pa cries out in response, without slowing down. “At last, at last!”

  But the dreamy vision of the cabin fades as we draw closer. It becomes painfully clear when we pull up that the yard and surrounding area are in need of some serious work. The bark from the logs is peeling away from the wood as if the cabin is shedding. Weeds have overgrown everything, spreading hungrily over the ground, the bottom perimeter of the cabin, even covering an old busted wheelbarrow that sits behind the fence.

  The fence itself is more of just a frame, really. Long pieces of broken wood tilt diagonally away from the posts and disappear into the grasses below. Extra pieces are piled nearby, though not nearly enough to finish the project, also covered in weeds. Sweat rolls down my neck and soaks into the collar of my already ruined dress.

  “Beautiful, indeed,” Ma remarks. “It looks like nobody has lived here for years.”

  “The weeds grow quickly out here, Susan.” Pa sighs, clearly aggravated at her lack of fervor. He pulls the reins in, and Blackjack and Peter slow to a stop in front of the new cabin. “They’ll only take one good workday to get rid of. And I’ll be able to scrape all that bark off with my draw knife, and re-clay the gaps between the logs...”

  Joanna and Charles jump from the wagon as soon as it stops. They run around the new yard like wild ones, cheering and screaming with their arms flapping around their heads. A couple of nearby rabbits flee in a wide-eyed frenzy. I get out and stretch gratefully, careful to hide my swollen abdomen away from my parents so they don’t take notice.

  Let this be my place to start anew, I think as I look again to the horizon of trees. For me and for the baby.

  I stop.

  The baby, not my baby. Even in my deepest thoughts I cannot feel grateful for it, and this fills me with shame.

  “Who cares if we have to fix it up, Ma?” Emily says from behind me, pulling me from my thoughts. She heads through the weeds to the front door of the cabin. “Look at the size of it!”

  Ma and I follow Emily while Pa tends to the animals, eager to see the inside, as well. Hannah sits on Ma’s hip, lowering her hands to glide over the tips of the grasses poking up from below. As we approach the door, it’s difficult to ignore the putrid stench that seems to be growing heavier with each step.

  “Ugh,” I say and pinch my nose. “What is that?”

  It’s too much for Hannah. She begins to scream, clawing into the air as if she wants to swim out of Ma’s arms and away from the door, and we’re forced to wait in the odor while Ma runs to set the baby in the back of the wagon so she can crawl around over the blankets.

  Emily doesn’t even look at me.

  The sun pounds down on us and the prairie, and I realize that never in my life have I bore witness to weather this hot. And isn’t it supposed to be autumn right now? I wonder if the stench is a dead animal roasting somewhere in the staggering heat. Hopefully the body isn’t inside the cabin.

  Ma rejoins us, and her face twists up again in reaction to the smell. She steps in front of Emily and opens the front door. The sight that greets us is silencing. My stomach breaks out in gooseflesh, despite the sweltering heat.

  The cabin’s hardwood floor has been completely torn out, and pokes jaggedly inward at the edges. Weeds and dirt and dead grass floor the entire inside, and the light from the open doorway prompts dozens of grasshoppers to fly through the air. Various pieces of furniture, most of them broken, lay scattered over the ground.

  There is a dark substance, a stinking liquid that covers the entire edge of the torn out floor. Even as much as I don’t want to believe it, I know that the liquid is, unquestionably, blood. There is more of it splattered up the sides of the peeling bark walls, and a broken chair amongst the wreckage is also ruined with the red. Fat black flies the size of coins buzz against the filthy glass window that lines the back wall.

  As terrible as the sight is, as positively jarring, it is nothing compared to the smell. Emily and Ma and I recoil and groan, our arms over our faces as we peer into the mess of a cabin. It is the smell of rot, thick and warm, it is the unmistakable smell of death. And it is heavy.

  “What in Heaven’s name?” Ma manages.

  “Why aren’t you going inside?” Pa calls from the front of the wagon, where he holds a bucket for Peter to drink from. “What’s it like?”

  “Come over here,” Ma yells back. “See for yourself.”

  The edge to her voice causes Pa’s smile to die away in a second. He steps over a piece of broken fence to meet us after checking on Hannah in the back of the wagon. His eyes squint in rage as he takes in the condition of the cabin.

  “What in the Hell?” he growls, and Ma doesn’t even scold him for the curse. He steps inside, and we all follow.

  “What happened here?” Emily asks, her voice meek. I look to the nearest corner of the cabin only to find that it’s been filled by pillars of dense s
pider webbing. “Pa, I think that this is blood. It looks like...”

  “I know what it looks like,” Pa snaps, his face flat. “Somebody must have slaughtered an ox or horse in here.”

  “But why would they do it inside?” Ma says. “This cabin is completely ruined! We cannot settle here.”

  “It’s not ruined.” Pa frantically begins picking up the old furniture, most of the pieces completely caked with the dried blood, and tossing them out the front door. “We can remove all of the soiled items, and remove the bark from the wall with my draw knife. And I’ll build a new floor.”

  “With what supplies?” Ma challenges. “And what money?”

  “I’ll find a way to arrange it,” Pa promises. “We can camp outside until I get it fixed. We’re almost at the end of the map that was drawn for me on the mountain. The nearby settlement should only be a day or so away to the west. I can leave tomorrow.”

  “You don’t even know if the settlement will be there!” Ma is starting to get teary. Emily and I remain silent. “They also said there would be ‘plenty’ of decent homesteads that were unoccupied, as well. Whoever drew up that map could have misremembered, they could be sending you out into the wilderness to die, or it could take you days—”

  “Susan.” The tone of Pa’s voice is dangerous enough to silence her outburst instantly. “You will camp outside with the children until I return, and then I’ll fix the floor and the walls and you’ll wonder what you ever had to complain about in the first place.”

  How heavy his desperation must be, if he is willing himself and the rest of us to accept the condition of this cabin. “It will be hard work,” he continues, “but the Lord will smile upon us for it.”

  I watch Pa work to move the broken furniture out to be burned. Here is my new home, my place to begin clean, a place that is rotted and overheated and covered in filth. I’ve never heard of anybody slaughtering an animal inside their cabin before. It’s almost fitting, in a sense.